The Human Aspect of QA Testing

December 17th, 2009

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When it comes to software quality, technical testing is not enough. You have to let a real human try it out, see how it works. This will assure your product to comply with the highest standards.

We all know that as technology becomes more complex, the risk of something going wrong increases. When technology fails, you feel a particular and frustrating type of rage called technorage.

Here at Border Stylo we are all about making users’ lives easier and eradicating technorage from the face of the Earth.

Our Rails apps are constantly and intensely being tested out through
Rspec. In addition, developers perform integration testing through Cucumber scenarios aka cukes. The feeling that you get when all your specs and cukes pass is priceless. It’s like when you are flying on coach, trying to fit in the mini seats and suddenly out of nowhere the flight attendant offers you a seat in first class.

However, this method is in the end performed by a machine, and so it can only take decisions based on objective considerations. The font size is too small? Your copy is being displayed in comic sans? The color palette seems to have been chosen by Cindy Lauper?

Well, if you only depend on unit tests you will probably never notice. This is when the human factor comes into the show.

Putting a human to test your software after your unit tests have passed will help you increase the quality of your product.

The main advantage of our QA strategy is that it is a closed loop. The people that write cukes during the Interaction Design Process are also involved in the QA testing rounds. This saves time since the testers know exactly how the product should behave. In addition, when QA takes place, these same people will do their best to cause havoc, destruction, and annihilation inside the components, which will eventually push the bugs afloat.

The bugs that are found get filtered, categorized and then translated into tickets (to-do’s) and are assigned to developers. Programmers work hard smashing these bugs with big ‘old school’ boots. Once the unit tests pass, then the team can push the next iteration.

Guess what comes next? The same demolition team walks in and bounces the code back and forth with rage, until more bugs come out. And this goes on and on, improving the experience for the user. As it is evident in this whole process, the interweaving of technical testing with human testing is almost seamless.

Combining the power of technical testing with the attention to details of human testing, results in a better product and happier users.

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Tagged with: QA, quality assurance, cucumber, rspec

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